'We just felt so helpless': Voices from the McCook protest
Estamos aquí por ustedes
Hi,
On Saturday, I joined my friend and contributor to the newsletter Brent Lucke on a roadtrip to southwest Nebraska. You might've already seen other coverage of the weekend's rally and vigil in support of migrants being held in the McCook detention center. There were quite a few journalists present, but I wanted to do some reporting of my own.
I went with one particular question in mind: What do people in McCook think about the prison that was dropped on their community almost exactly one year ago? So I talked to some folks who were there at the rally, including the owners of the land where it took place.
I wrote about the experience for Luke O'Neil's excellent Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Below, you can read the first few paragraphs from that story, though you'll have to click through to see the rest. It should be free to read, but definitely give Luke some money anyway. He's an OG in the independent newsletter space and a paid Welcome to Hell World subscription is worth every dollar. (So is a paid This Week In Lincoln subscription by the way.)
Estamos aquí por ustedes
Drive north from the city of McCook in southwest Nebraska and you'll soon see the signs. There are five along the roadside, all painted in black and white and most with text large enough to be visible from passing cars.
"How much is enough?" asks one. "Shame on Pillen" reads another in a callout of our state's conservative governor. And then a message in Spanish.
"Somos amigos de los inmigrantes."
Another sign has a long list of names including Leo Cruz Silva, Victor Manuel Diaz, Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and many others. All were people killed — directly or indirectly — by ICE or the Border Patrol.
The final sign, added later than the others, reads "We have not forgotten." It's a message intended not just for motorists, but also for the people being held in the immigration detention center just up the road.
"There's so much suffering going on inside," Deborah Walters told me.
She and her husband John are longtime residents of McCook, and they own the field in which the signs are planted. I was one of hundreds who arrived by the literal busload on Saturday for a rally and vigil on their land.
For me it was a grueling journey — a seven hour round trip in a friend's truck with no AC in the middle of August — but I was determined to be there. The detention center, which opened late last year and housed immigrants kidnapped from Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, is an ugly blight on the state's conscience. I wanted to see how Nebraskans would respond to that moral injury. More than anything I was curious what local residents thought about this concentration camp that had been foisted on them by the federal government and Governor Jim Pillen, a man who worked closely with the Trump administration to bring it to the Cornhusker State.
"We just felt so helpless," Deborah told me. "How can we help these people? We don't know who they are. We see on the news that families are being separated. They're taking the husband and father and locking them up somewhere, and families don't even know where they went. And we thought, well, maybe we should protest. And since my husband owned this land, he said, ‘We can protest out here.’”
Read the rest at Welcome to Hell World.
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~ Ty
P.S. Here's a few more photos from McCook:
